Smartphones in the US were painfully abysmal before the iPhone. Every phone I owned before the iPhone deserved to be immediately flushed down a toilet. And I owned most of them. The stuff was GOD AWFUL. I remember using a friend's Nokia which was essentially a flip-out camera with a phone embedded into it, and it took 1/3rd of an hour of searching and 7 menu clicks to take a photo.

I'm not a huge fan of RIM. It never seemed to get more usable than a baseline Treo. Which, don't get me wrong, wasn't a bad phone. But RIM made some befuddling option layout choices. And worse than that, they really only had about 5 functions, but they had about 30 or 40 input icons.

Blackberrys were not as bad as Nokias, by any stretch of the imagination. They had bloat problems, and were in love with proprietary technologies that were only useful to about 0.1% of their user base. Ultimately, I never

Well, sometimes the "freedom to choose less freedom" isn't a good option to have. Chances are it becomes more or less mandatory.

Let's say for example that my employer wants to install surveillance cameras to see how well we're working. I'd say "no way" and start working for another company. But when that company starts doing the same thing, and then the next, then soon I might run out of jobs to apply for. This way a pressure is created to accept measures you're uncomfortable with even though it's still

Replace with that with "pre-employment drug testing" and your example would be a case of something that has already happened. When the stock boy at Target must pass a drug test to get a job (a job so mind-numbing that you practically need to smoke a dube to unwind after work), all semblance of freedom has gone out the window.

Its also the first widely popular smartphone that 'jsut works' The iPhone IS an incredible piece of hardware/software. Its not as open as we would like, but that doesnt mean its not a VERY capable device. I carried a windows phone for 4 years. I couldnt even install ACROBAT on it without failing.

Sure, but the difference between an iphone and similar open platforms is pretty minor. We're not talking life or death here, nor the difference between being employed or not. There's what, a slightly smoother general "experience", and a handful of games that are iphone-only. As I say (above post was accidentally anonymous), you can't care much about freedom if that's enough to give it up for.

Stephen Fry is an old man enjoying popularity with the young crowd by latching himself on to things he doesn't really understand.

The minute he is criticised or meets some opposition to his actions he will storm off in a pathetic strop.

You know this for fact? irrespective of what people might think of Fry's personality, he is very far from dim. It would not surprise me that he has a pretty decent handle on what he is prepared to discuss. IANAG (geriatric), even so I think that some of the biggest and most revered names in FOSS and such like are well and truly in Fry's age group. That said, he does strop.

You're either a troll, or are ignorant. I saw a speech he gave a few years ago that was broadcast on BBC Parliament (or whatever it's called) on software freedom, DRM, format-shifting, P2P etc and he completely grokked the issues. He's not "just an old man", or "just a celebrity", he's actually incredibly fucking astute. He's a high-profile, highly intelligent celebrity, who actually knows what he's talking about, and exactly the kind of person people in power might actually listen to, as opposed to some AC on/. or "some beardy yank". tl;dr: He shares "our views" and communicates at a level that most British politicians respect and understand. This is a Good Thing.

You're right. I find it strange that people who don't want to be stereotyped (such as "he's just a geek") stereotype other people so readily ("he's just a comedian"). News at 11: People sometimes have more than one interest!

Asia Carrera, in addition to being a porn star, was at one time ranked number one in Unreal Tournament in the world. Crack all the jokes you like, but when was the last time you made millions and were ranked number one at a video game when it was at the top of its popularity?

It isn't terribly clear that Woz ever much cared about anything but the pure tech side of hacking(at which he is definitely several cuts above, albeit with most of his serious projects at the point of being historical now.). His unfortunate air crash, and cranial trauma(almost certainly under diagnosed and treated, given the tech and minimal understanding of traumatic brain injuries of the time) may also have blunted him a bit from his best days... He may also just not much care, or not be cut out to be int

Seconded. If you're familiar with the American TV show "House" then your familiar with another brilliant British actor and Fry friend and Blackadder alum Hugh Laurie, who has nothing but high praise for Fry. Fry I thought was also brilliant in the flawed "V for Vendetta" film adaptation of the great graphic novel. He a charming and intelligent actor and if he stands behind something I can buy into it.

Fry and Laurie co-starred in a sketch comedy show called A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which I thought was brilliant. Particularly in the later seasons they did some wickedly weird gags, somewhere on the Monty Python scale of surrealism combined with brainy wit. I don't know if it's available on DVD in the United States, but you know, it's out there...

Tried to watch the first episode last night on Netflix streaming. I love Wooster & Jeeves. There were a few funny gags in this, but it rapidly got so much of a bore that I was forced by my fellow TV watchers to turn it off.

It isn't a gigantic surprise, actually. Outside of pure slapstick/dick-jokes circles, verbal comedy is actually a reasonably intellectually demanding flavor of entertainment-celebrity-dom. You essentially have to constantly (depending on the precise flavor) be either making concise-but-incisive observations about things that your audience knows about(so your jokes don't go right over their heads); but in a way that they haven't already thought of(so you don't merely bore them), and your phrasing has to be f

I didn't notice that (but then, I treat most of the "Celeb Nooz" parts of the gutter press with the contempt it deserves ; I wouldn't wipe the shit out of my crack with them, not out of respect for their finer feelings but because their rags use cheap paper that your fingers go through) ; but unless Fry's public sex life has changed drastically (see parenthetic comment above), then as a celibate he can be blunt about women's unpleasantly drippy, bleedy bits without facing charges of hypocrisy due to nonethe

Yep. when all those ignorant young people discover that Fry is actually intelligent, educated and talented, they'll drop him like a hot potato and go back to pirating videos of anaemic pop songs performed by anorexic, Auto-tuned[tm] teen fashion models.

If you want to know the truth, look at the calendar. People who were born more than ten years apart have nothing to say to each other. Koko Taylor or Billie Holiday have nothing to offer that fashion model pop star, because they belong to an era before iTu

There are anemic pop songs performed by anorexic, Auto-tuned(R) teen fashion models? I assumed that they were 20 something actors, former homeless people who now work in the music industry, You Tube prodigies, and industry created talent with the rare talented person thrown in. As for Billie Holiday having nothing to offer, wait long enough. Everything is recycled.

On an episode of the popular quiz show QI, Emma Thompson revealed that she lost the screenplay on her faulty computer. When a repairman could not retrieve the file, she took the computer in a taxi to friend Stephen Fry, who, along with flatmate Hugh Laurie, spent seven hours retrieving the missing file.

personally i am not a mac fan either however stephen fry does like their stuff and it was the writer Dougles Adams that got him into apple products

he has also been dealing with mental health issues and WINNING.. he's not the type to run off in a strop....

perhaps you should not comment on subjects that YOU can't understand or people you blatantly know nothing about eh?

The better question is why other people didn't see that coming. I mean the whole point of computing earlier on was to get through a set of data more quickly than one could manually do it. And to keep going longer as well. Both of which point to larger amounts of memory and disk space being needed.

Given the amount of scientific discovery at the time it seems a bit odd to not think there was a huge need in the future.

I think it's easy to say that in an era of essentially free computing hardware. Dig deeper and you'll see that it *was* obvious to many people that computers were useful, it's just that they were too large, expensive and cantankerous at first.

BTW, I'm glad you see that computers started because of "to get through a set of data more quickly than one could manually do it.", and *not* the insane viewpoint that we only have computers because of the space race of the 1960s. We could do the space race *because* w

If I remember correctly he's a manic depressive, so possibly the odd strop is not unreasonable. Also given the propensity for Slashdotters to be a bit odd, I don't think it's entirely fair to put him down for some behavioural quirks, many of which are less serious than those exhibited by stereotypical computer types.

Yes, credit card fraud when he was 17 (three months' sentence), thirty-five years ago. Then he went to Cambridge, joined the Footlights, and began a brilliant career. (This was all covered in the BBC's celebration of Fry and Hugh Laurie's work just last Wednesday.)

From Wikipedia: "In December 2006 he was ranked sixth for the BBC's Top Living Icon Award, was featured on The Culture Show, and was voted most intelligent man on television by readers of Radio Times. [...] BBC Four dedicated two nights of progr

He's not just a comedian though is he? Most actresses know less about foreign policy than Sarah Palin, whereas Stephen Fry knows a lot about open-ness, DRM and the importance of being able to play a DVD on the OS of your choice. Should we ignore anything Brian May has to say on the subject of Astrophysics because he's "just a musician"?

The Brian Cox he means is the ex-bandmember of D:Ream, who has a PhD in particle physics, not astrophysics. He currently works on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

While his musical efforts are not as iconic as those of Dr May, his scientific contributions, both in terms of the science itself, and his promotion of the public understanding of science, are arguably more significant.

Doubtful, Ms. Palin seems to be deliberately obtuse about foreign policy. For God's sake she thinks that being governor of a state next to Russia counts as experience with international relations. And she spend most of her time in office running for VP.

"Write" is a strong word. How about "published posthumously as part of a larger collection of writings?"

Are you saying that Adams published his own work posthumously? Neat trick. He did, of course, write it, and it was first published as a column for MacWorld magazine. The posthumous collection of works came after... *cue eerie music*

That was a strong comment. How about published humorously in as “Dongly Things, A Pox on the Panoply of Plugs,” in US version of MacWorld magazine in September 1996 (p. 140) and republished in his post-humous book, The Salmon of Doubt.

How the hell is "write" a strong word? When and however it was published, he wrote it.

Both Stephen and Douglas have used Apple Mac's since 1984.. and both have had stories told about them of their ability to fix low level problems with them

Yes they may never have never complied a program in their life and their knowledge may be limited to a set of machines, but if that means they are not techies then you seem to be moving the goalposts to exclude them deliberately ?

Not necessarily. You'll get a functional device in that case yes, but whenever USB enters a new major revision they've had to tack on a new chip to the mix. And there's no guarantee that the new chip will be completely compatible in terms of protocol with the older ones. In fact I'd suggest that they aren't compatible otherwise they wouldn't need a separate chip for it.

Not necessarily. You'll get a functional device in that case yes, but whenever USB enters a new major revision they've had to tack on a new chip to the mix. And there's no guarantee that the new chip will be completely compatible in terms of protocol with the older ones. In fact I'd suggest that they aren't compatible otherwise they wouldn't need a separate chip for it.

So, wait. How do you get a functional device if the interface chip is incompatible? You lost me there. Either they communicate effectively, and the device is functional, or they don't (and it isn't).

I presume the main purpose of this is analyzing the communication between a USB device and its proprietary Windows driver. Wouldn't it be easier to modify virtualization software to do this? Qemu can already connect a real USB device to a virtual machine (see its "-usbdevice host:" option).

Two main reasons: Embedded device peripherals, and USB device development. Sometimes you don't have access to the OS running on the host to set up a sniffer (game consoles, some smartphones, and similar). And sometimes you need to debug a USB device that you're developing, and software USB sniffers don't provide the kind of detail needed to do that effectively (some errors are only evident when you watch the stuff on the wire, not the high-level requests).

Also, software sniffers are imperfect. I've had issues with them. A physical hardware device is completely transparent and can work without either side noticing anything. Sure, you can make do with a software sniffer sometimes, but that doesn't mean there's no point to a hardware version.

And since this is open, it can be repurposed for other uses. For example, you could use only the device port, and turn it into a kind of usb device-to-device bridge that lets your computer impersonate a USB device. That is currently not possible except on embedded systems with USB device controllers, and those have limitations. You could also use it as a pretty good logic analyzer, given proper firmware.

Pardon my ignorance, but why can't this sort of thing be done entirely in software? On consoles this wouldn't be possible, but for Windows can't you create a virtual USB driver which is a proxy to hardware USB device? It seems folks have been doing this sort of thing with Ethernet for a long time.

I pledged $50, it's my most sincere hope that projects like this get off the ground. The students/hackers/tinkerers that are super into this kind of stuff could use all the tools they can get, I'm just a newbie when it comes to this stuff, but I can certainly respect it. Anyway, here's hoping that they hit 200% pledges, they're already at 115%!

Having worked with several commercial USB protocol analyzers over the years I have yet to see one was anything more than an FPGA connected to an off the shelf USB PHY chip. As much as I like cute dog videos these guys need to post proper requirements and design specifications if they seriously want funding from me.

Having worked with several commercial USB protocol analyzers over the years I have yet to see one was anything more than an FPGA connected to an off the shelf USB PHY chip. As much as I like cute dog videos these guys need to post proper requirements and design specifications if they seriously want funding from me.

Click through the links to the actual Kickstarter project description. We did some handwaving to keep it accessible for J. Random (Software) Hacker, but I think we gave enough details to answer your questions.

(tl;dr: yes, you're right, and that's more or less what we're doing. Haven't decided on which PHY to use, looking at some SMSC and NXP parts.)

OpenVizsla will be a completely open design of a device that can capture USB 1.1/2.0 (high-speed, full-speed and low-speed) traffic passively between a target U